House of the Muses
About
A grand riverside residence rose at Zeugma on the Euphrates in the late 1st century CE, home to an officer or merchant grown wealthy on frontier trade. Its floors were later paved with mosaics of the nine Muses circling Calliope, goddess of epic poetry. The house stood until the Sasanian sack of the city in 252-253 CE. Archaeologists uncovered it only after 2007, just ahead of the rising waters of the Birecik Dam.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
Sources
Nearby
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